According to Eric Schmidt, Co-Founder of Google, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. The need for data, storage, and processing resources has driven large technological advancements in how computing is delivered. These have predominantly focused around virtualization, high density computing, storage consolidation, and centralization.
A facility such as a data center is used to store computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. The facility generally includes a number of different types of devices for operational purposes and also for protection reasons. Such devices include, but are not limited to, redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression devices, etc.) and also various security devices. Data centers can be large enough to need to be housed in large buildings, and can use an enormous amount of electricity to run properly.
To keep pace with the increasing demand, data center infrastructure has historically been oversized at design. To allow a rapid increase in capacity vendors have started to develop more modular infrastructure products. These include modular centralized UPS systems, power distribution units, cooling units, and room construction (raised floors and drop ceilings). As such, IT loads would increase with little change to the infrastructure until the infrastructure could no longer support the load or redundancy requirements. At that time, consultants or in-house teams would be tasked to redesign the data center infrastructure by utilizing these modular components, and size it for future IT growth, starting the cycle all over again.
Up until recently these infrastructure components acted predominantly independently from one another and were always responding in a reactive nature to the IT load. This has spawned the recent advent of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) hardware and software, and environmental monitoring hardware and software.
According to the DOE, operators of the vast majority of data centers across the U.S. do not currently practice “energy management” to improve their efficiency and reduce energy costs. Kathleen Hogan, DOE's deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency, told Mashable in an interview that “half of the energy used to power a data center is used for the cooling and powering of equipment, with the other half going to actually running the servers and other IT equipment.”
The trend in increasing IT loads and smarter infrastructure products has sparked the idea that data center infrastructure needs to grow along side with IT, not just react to it. Companies and organizations like Google, Apple, and NREL have started to pave the way to prove that keeping data center infrastructure in sync with the IT equipment not only reduces operational costs, but also increases stability and reliability.
Case studies from these companies & organizations, government regulations, subsidies, and increasing energy costs have opened up the market for solutions that optimize data center infrastructure and reduce operational costs. According to DOE statistics, data center electricity use doubled between 2001 to 2006, from 30 to 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and stood at about 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity as of 2013. This amounts to about 2% of all U.S. electricity use and is increasing. Already, there are millions of data centers in the U.S., amounting to about one center per 100 individuals, and this is expected to continue to grow as more computing applications for large and small companies are moved to these facilities.
With an increase in the need for additional storage, such as for cloud computing and other storage needs, individuals, businesses and governmental organizations, have increased their needs for data centers and in doing so, has put pressure on the data centers to grow, and yet maintain the same security, availability, environmental impact and adherence to standards as previously provided. As such Data centers typically cost a lot to build, grow and to maintain.
Also, as technology improves and customer demands increase, the IT technology in facilities such as data centers changes rapidly. In particular, IT equipment, configurations, power densities, etc. change rapidly inside those data center, and at the same time, critical infrastructure components like cooling systems, air flow distribution, humidity controls, etc. remain relatively static, even while the IT equipment changes. The infrastructure lag results in inefficient operation of the critical environmental controls that support the IT equipment. This leads to increases in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and drives up overall operating costs. In some cases, IT changes can be so significant that the environmental conditions push elements of the IT equipment into fault tolerances and can put quality of service at risk.
When a typical new Tier III data center is commissioned, a team of competent engineers, operators, and business people come together to build a facility that is optimized to deliver IT services in the current business climate at the time, with room to grow into their best guess forecast. The IT demands can drastically change based on the launch of a single app, innovation, or the acquisition of a new customer.
For example, if the data center acquires a new customer whose primary use is compute cycles, the processors in the data center could see dramatically higher utilization in a matter of seconds and therefore produce significantly more heat in the physical space that they occupy. Meanwhile, the HVAC systems deliver cold air in the same locations. Eventually as the temperature averages out through the facility, the HVAC equipment will register a slight increase in average temperature and respond by increasing cooling and airflow to all the locations it is already delivering cold air to. In this scenario, the majority of the equipment is being over cooled to compensate for the exception. This scenario is the state of the art in today's data centers and is very inefficient when there are shifts in IT demand, density, or distribution.
There are often thousands of IT devices in a large Tier III data center. If there are alarms on the IT equipment itself, the operator has to be able to physically locate the device inside of a large facility to know where the issue is. Compounding the problem is that there are frequent upgrades and changes to the IT equipment inside the data center as businesses and operators strive up with improving technologies. As a result the CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings used for asset management are constantly out of date.
In today's environment, data center operators are held accountable for meeting certain service levels, and are thus highly focused on the IT equipment's performance. The supporting infrastructure tends to be significantly overdesigned and set to produce at levels significantly higher than is required by the IT equipment. This configuration allows operators to build large wasteful operating margins into the infrastructure equipment, to simplify the problem and focus on optimizing the IT hardware. Over time, incremental IT upgrades increase the loads on the infrastructure until the performance is no longer adequate to safely support the operation of the IT equipment. At this stage, consultants or internal teams are called in to solve the problem by redesigning or upgrading the facility. It is not uncommon to see significant infrastructure changes quarterly with the rapid pace of IT changes.
It would be advantageous to provide a system and related methods for utilizing software to control sensors and record environmental and other data obtained from those sensors and other devices that have been strategically placed throughout a facility, in a flexible, low maintenance package with automated geographic mapping. It would also be advantageous if, once the data is sensed, measured and recorded, the system and methods would analyze the information and display the information in a detailed status report, indicating the environmental conditions inside facility along with recommendations to implement measures that increase the efficiency of the particular facility.